“It’s very difficult to run alone,” said Sethennai. “You would not be alone. You would be with me.” The laughter was gone from his face; his brows drawn together in concentration. His gauntleted hands were clenched tight at his sides. Deep in the mountain, the Unspoken One was beginning to notice him.
“The Prioress—” said Csorwe.
“She will never know you’re gone,” said Sethennai. “Make your choice, Csorwe. Stay here, or come with me. We are running out of time.”
“But the Unspoken One will know,” said Csorwe. She could feel the beginnings of its outrage already, building and crackling under the earth.
“Yes,” said Sethennai. “It will. The secret of greatness is to know when you should risk the wrath of god.”
He took off his gauntlets and held out a hand, and she took it. His hand was smooth, long-fingered, bearing a gold signet; hers small, blunt, and stained to the wrist with calf’s blood.
“Come along, Csorwe,” he said, “and let the Unspoken One cry for you in the pit.”
2
The Maze of Echoes
CSORWE HAD BEEN SENT to die before breakfast. By the evening of that day, she and Sethennai were far from the Shrine, aboard a riverboat. This was a new experience among new experiences. For the first night and day she lay on a coil of rope in the bilges, wishing she was dead, as she deserved.
On the second day, something worse than guilt occurred to her. There was a chapter that Csorwe had always enjoyed in The Book of Unmaking, detailing the proper punishment of a traitor. By the shore of the corrupted sea, in the shadow of the coal-black tower, she forsook the Nameless One. May the abyss consume the breaker of promises! May the maggots eat the flesh of her vessel! May her name be forgotten utterly!
“What would you do,” she said, picking her words with caution, “if the Prioress found out, and came to get me back?”
“How would she ever find out?” said Sethennai. “You went up the mountain and you did not return. If the Prioress was so keen to ensure that you were devoured by the god instead of, for instance, going on the run with a strange man, perhaps she should have kept a closer eye on you.”
“She might notice you’re gone,” said Csorwe, and added, very daring, “The librarian might notice.”
Sethennai laughed. “Oranna might notice long enough to be glad to see the back of me.”
“But what would you do if she came after me?”
“I suppose I’d have to kill her,” said Sethennai. He was very cheerful, sitting up at the prow and watching the murky banks as they passed. “Csorwe, even if it occurs to her that you are alive—even if she makes a spectacular leap of logic and realises you are with me—even then—how would she ever find us? We are long gone.”
They left the river, and at last they came to one of the Lesser Gates of Oshaar, green as a cat’s eye, sunk into a cliff face at the bottom of an overgrown valley.
Csorwe had seen Gates drawn and described before, but never in person. They had seemed easy to picture—a circle of green fire, burning in a frame of stone, large enough for someone to pass through—but the reality was both more solid and more strange than she had imagined.
The Lesser Gate was twice as wide as Sethennai was tall, and the flickering light that it cast turned the earth and the undergrowth greener than grass ever was. Bands and fronds of liquid light swarmed across its surface, swirling like leaves in the wind.
It hummed, like a glass bell, struck once and left to reverberate in eternity.
Csorwe had an uneasy feeling that perhaps it was forbidden for her to leave Oshaar, but dismissed it. Like Sethennai said, they were long gone.
“You just go through?” she said. “Does it burn you?”
Sethennai held out a hand, shimmering in the light of the Gate, and she took it. They stepped through as one, and then they were falling, like two twigs in a waterfall. Csorwe tumbled weightless into nothingness.
When they landed, the first thing she heard was the sound of wind. Her other hand, the one which was not still clenched like a claw in Sethennai’s, opened and closed against the current. For a while she was aware of nothing but the edge of the air against her palm.
“This place is called the Maze of Echoes,” said Sethennai.
Gradually her sight returned, and she gazed out at the Maze, as if by gazing she could make sense of it. They stood on a ledge above the place where a steep valley dropped away, down and down, out of reach of light. Pillars and arches of rock massed in the darkness, like misshapen brides, veiled and wreathed with mist. Fragments of sky like pieces of eggshell were visible in places, though not the places one usually saw the sky.
Sethennai pointed to a track that wound along a cliff face. “This way,” he said. “It’s not so far, really. The Maze is only an interstice. A great celestial entrepôt.”
Csorwe nodded as though she understood a word of this, and followed him. You heard of someone travelling by Maze, as they might travel on horseback or in a wagon. She knew you had to go through the Maze to reach other worlds, alien countries, dangerous places utterly unlike Oshaar—but she hadn’t imagined it anything like this.
As they travelled, Csorwe wondered what Sethennai meant by not so far. The journey soon became the longest she had ever taken. They passed through valleys, under arches, and through narrow passages in the rock. They trailed along the bottom of a gorge, in whose walls maze-gates like great emeralds glittered, high up and far out of reach. The sound of them, singing one to another across the deep, was like a choir far away. Shivers prickled at the back of Csorwe’s neck.
At times they stopped, and Csorwe slept. Once they saw a far-off mazeship passing through: the hull of polished maze-oak, and the sail canopies belling above the hull like a growth of mushrooms. Up close, it would have been the grandest and brightest thing Csorwe had ever seen, but the mists of the Maze dulled its pennants, and it passed in oblivious silence.
All these wonders meant that it took her a long time to realise that she missed the House of Silence. She missed her cell. She missed the shape of the day: the prayers at every interval, the making of offerings, meals in the refectory, and all the rest. She could never have gone back to that. Even if she had stayed, those days were over. If Sethennai hadn’t come for her she would be dead by now.
These facts drifted along behind her, like huge tethered clouds, though she did her best not to look at them directly: she had betrayed her people. She had betrayed her purpose. She had betrayed her god.
She missed her home. They would have killed her if she had stayed. But still she missed it.
Well, she said to herself, she was away, now, and Sethennai had some other purpose for her.
After a while they left the Maze, coming out through another Gate into another world. Csorwe was tense with anticipation, struggling not to betray to Sethennai the fact that this was entirely new to her and almost entirely terrifying. In her old life, Csorwe had accompanied the Prioress on her annual procession to visit the faithful in their villages, but this had never taken them farther than a few days’ travel from the House of Silence. She couldn’t conceive how far they had come. Not just far from the House of Silence but far from Oshaar, from the whole realm of the Unspoken.